Remember Me Like This

by Bret Anthony Johnston

  CECIL USED TO TELL ERIC STORIES. THAT’S WHAT CONNIE WOULD say: “Oh, your daddy’s just telling stories.” If they took a drive somewhere—to the zoo in Brownsville or the rattlesnake races in Refugio—when Eric was too young to know better, Cecil would slyly honk the horn with his palm and then look around in confusion. “What is it, Daddy?” Eric would ask from the backseat, and Cecil would say an airplane had landed on their car’s roof. The boy could laugh! Cecil told him there were swamps in Louisiana where spheres of fire bloomed nightly and rolled across the water like soccer balls, and he said there were caverns running beneath much of South Texas, tunnels with secret entrances and exits, and yes, of course, he knew where they were. One afternoon when they were driving home from an airshow at the Army Depot in Corpus, Eric asked how Flour Bluff got its name and Cecil invented a story about a pirate who covered the dunes in white flour so that his sons could pretend it was snow. “But,” Cecil said, pleased by the way the tale suddenly fitted itself to the language, “it was all a bluff. It was a big flour bluff.”

  Years later, after Eric started teaching Texas history, he said, “You had the flour part right.” He explained that the area was named after an event in 1838 when Texas forces captured a band of men smuggling flour and other contraband in from Mexico. “I like the pirate and snow version better,” Cecil lied. He was already imagining how he’d dispense the information at the pawnshop, how he’d brag on his son having taught it to him. He also knew he would, for the rest of his life, think of Eric’s story every time he came off the Kennedy Causeway and drove into the Bluff.

  So it was on his mind as he passed the men fishing in waders in the cloud-gray water, but before long he was paying strict attention to the area. He turned off the Bach, concentrating. There were places to rent kayaks and Jet Skis, and places to get tattooed and pierced. A Baptist church was hemmed by a newly laid asphalt parking lot, so for half a mile the air smelled of piney tar. Tall, spindly weeds grew through buckled sidewalks. Highway barrels from a long-stalled road repair project had faded from bright orange to a translucent pink; one was doubled over like it had been hit with a baseball bat. Cars with sun-blistered paint, and bumper stickers that read GUN CONTROL IS BEING ABLE TO HIT YOUR TARGET and 1 CROSS + 3 NAILS = 4 GIVEN. The Army-Navy Credit Union anchored the corner of Waldron Road, and behind it loomed a Walmart, the lot already bustling. On the marquee of another church were the words FREE TRIP TO HEAVEN. DETAILS INSIDE. A nail salon, a palm reader, men selling watermelons and pecans and nets of oranges at the stoplight. Cecil turned onto Yorktown Boulevard, passing an abandoned shopping center. The storefronts were scrolled with elaborate gang tags that looked like calligraphy.

  How many times had he trawled through here in the last four years? Eric, too. Or, worse, how many of these sorry places had become familiar to Justin in that time? Surely Dwight Buford had pushed a cart through the Walmart and bought cheap fried-fish baskets at the Boat ’n Net off to the west. Cecil remembered that Justin had loved hush puppies, and it was destabilizing to think the boy might have eaten countless quantities of them an hour away from Southport. Flour Bluff had been papered with the MISSING flyers. Early on, volunteers had hung them, and once their involvement dwindled, Cecil and Eric had driven out with tape and staple guns. Maybe Buford had tooled around in his truck tearing them down before he threw his paper route—or more sadistically, he might have made Justin do it—or maybe if Cecil dedicated himself, he could scour the area and find one of the flyers still hanging in a window. He turned up the air conditioner and readjusted the vents to blow on him. He’d started sweating.

  Bay Breeze Suites was a one-story complex about two miles beyond the Bluff’s center. A slack chain-link fence bordered three sides of the property. The grass was patchy and blond. No trees. No shrubs or hedges. There was a gravel parking lot and a blue dumpster with trash bags spilling onto the ground. A young girl was lazily throwing a basketball at a rusted, bent-down hoop. The apartments themselves were painted brick, a neglected aqua. Each had a window unit and a screen door, and a few had folding lawn chairs out front. Residents used old coffee cans full of sand for ashtrays. The complex was horseshoe-shaped—Cecil thought it had been an old no-tell motel at some point—so the layout formed something of a courtyard. In the center of the dry grass stood a brick barbecue pit and a metal picnic table. There were empty beer bottles arranged on the table, maybe from a gathering the night before or maybe from as far back as the Fourth. Cecil parked his truck near the road, put on his sunglasses, and stepped out into the heat.

  The door of Apartment 23 had been boarded up with three-quarter-inch plywood. The front window, too. Had it not been for the crime scene notices stapled in the center of the boards, someone might have surmised the apartment had been battened down for a storm and forgotten. Cecil had expected such a barricade, but he was still disappointed. Seeing firsthand the conditions in which Justin had lived seemed necessary. He had no intentions of telling anyone he’d visited Bay Breeze, and yet he believed he’d return to Southport with a perspective that would somehow prove beneficial. What that might be, he didn’t know. He only knew he’d expected to find something here, and he knew this now because he knew he wouldn’t find anything at all.

  When he turned to walk back to the truck, the girl with the basketball was blocking his path. Cecil bumped into her, was suddenly on top of her. He had to grab her arm to keep from knocking her down.

  “Excuse you,” she said.

  Cecil dipped his chin in apology. His eyes scanned behind the girl, looking for people watching from between parted curtains.

  “I’m going to start charging admission,” the girl said. “Ten bucks a head. I’ll be filthy rich by the time I’m sixteen.”

  Her hair was a dark, listless red. It hung to her shoulders and she had to keep tucking a hank behind her ear. She wore an oversized tank top and frayed cutoffs over a purple one-piece bathing suit. She started dribbling her basketball and the noise reverberated down the walkway. Cecil brushed past her and moved swiftly toward his truck. He walked with his head down as if it had started pouring rain.

  The girl caught her ball and trotted close behind him, oddly reminding him of the seagulls that had hovered alongside the ferry. She said, “You don’t want my tour? How about for half price? Five bucks gets you all the child abuse and pedophilia you can stan—”

  Cecil stopped and swung around to face the girl. He said, “If you so much as think those words again, I’ll put you across my knee and whip your little ass right here in the parking lot.”

  She smiled, her eyes alight and taunting. She said, “Big talk from a pervert.”

  He started toward his truck again, giving the girl a wide berth.

  “Big talk from a dirty old man that drove into the sticks to see where a fat fuck used to give it to some sweet boy.”

  He halted again. He stood still not because he was angry, but because her voice betrayed a protectiveness he recognized. The girl was in front of him now, dribbling her ball. Her hair had fallen into her face, and although Cecil expected her to tuck it behind her ear, she left the lock hanging. He said, “You knew him?”

  “So now you do want the tour? Classic indecisive pervert,” she said.

  “I’m asking if you knew him.”

  “Of course I knew him.”

  “Tell me,” Cecil said.

  The girl caught her ball and stared at him from behind her hair. A fan belt squealed a few blocks away. The girl never averted her gaze. Cecil thought she might be looking at her reflection in his sunglasses, but then he realized she was deciding what he was worth telling. She resumed her dribbling and said, “Everyone felt sorry for him.”

  “Y’all knew what was happening?”

  “Nope.” She watched the ball bounce between her palm and the ground like a yo-yo. “We thought Justin was his nephew. The story was that Dwight was his godfather and he was taking him in because Justin’s parents had been killed in a car accident up in Dallas. That�
��s the headline version. When Dwight told the story, it was all detailed and heartbreaking.”

  “No one suspected anything.”

  “It’s not a popular view now that we know he’s into ass-rape and all, but Dwight was cool. Like, he had karaoke parties and he’d give out free newspapers. He was rad at foosball. He’d always get the new videogames the day they came out. He bought Justin his snake. People, like, admired him for taking in his dead sister’s kid.”

  “And what about Justin?”

  The girl twisted the lock of hair and hooked it primly behind her ear. She said, “He was always real quiet, which totally made sense, given that we thought his parents had croaked. He never sang on karaoke nights, but he liked videogames and Sasha, his snake. I named her, by the way.”

  “He never tried to tell anyone? Never tried running?”

  “Nope,” she said. “And he had lots of chances. The three of us—me, him, and Sasha—used to go looking for shells and rocks. Once he found this really beautiful conch and gave it to me. It was pretty sick.”

  Cecil didn’t know what to say. He was tired again, battered-feeling. An orange-and-white two-seater plane flew over and banked toward Cabaniss Field. The pilot was practicing touch-and-gos.

  “Did you ever see a white Mercedes around here? The driver would have been wearing a straw cowboy—”

  “Dwight’s father,” she said. “He came around last week for the first time. We’d never seen him before.”

  “What was he after?”

  “I didn’t talk to him, but I’m sure he’s after what you’re after, what I’m after, what everyone’s after.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “Whatever will make all of this go away.”

  Cecil wouldn’t have said that’s what he was looking for, but the girl was right. He said, “Who talked to him?”

  “Mr. Salinas,” she said. “I wouldn’t really call it talking, though. Mr. Salinas kind of gave him the old what-for. I’m given to understand a crowbar was involved.”

  A sudden jolt of pleasure, a sense of admiration, the need to suppress a smile. Cecil said, “That’s a tough day.”

  The girl studied him again, then nodded. She said, “He never opened up, not completely. Justin, I mean. I knew he had all of these walls up, but I assumed it was because he’d lost his parents.”

  “You can’t take it personally,” he said.

  “I swear I’m, like, really happy for him, I totally am, but I’m not stoked that he’s over there and I’m stuck here.”

  The temptation was to placate her, to suggest that Justin would get in touch or their paths would cross again, but Cecil knew the therapist had told Eric and Laura that all the old ties needed to stay severed. The Coast Guard plane made another pass, but the girl seemed uninterested now that she was thinking of Justin. She was holding the basketball in front of her stomach, cradling it with both hands.

  He said, “Well, I had better be—”

  “Here’s the thing,” the girl interrupted. “My mom’s pretty religious, right? She speaks in tongues at the drop of a hat—she did it for, like, an hour when we found out about Justin—and she’s given most of our money to various TV preachers.”

  “You’re losing me.”

  “So she’s also all about the Rapture. She’s convinced that the righteous are going to be taken up and the heathens are going to be left behind.”

  “Okay.”

  “I used to hide from her. I’d leave my shoes in the hallway so she’d think I’d been chosen.”

  “I need to head out. I do appreciate your talking with—”

  “She hated it. I’d scoot under my bed and listen to her running around the house, screaming my name,” she said. “It’s exactly how I feel about Justin. Like, I know he’s in a better place, but I really miss him. I keep thinking he’ll call or stop by, but the only people who come around are perverts and cops and reporters.”

  “Not one shred of this is easy,” Cecil said.

  The girl pressed the heel of her hand to her eyes. She hadn’t started crying, but the threat existed. She said, “We’d been playing videogames before they went to the flea market. We had the game saved on my memory card and were going to pick it up again once he got back and fed Sasha.”

  “But he never came back,” Cecil said.

  “I worried they’d been in an accident. I was trying to figure out if I could somehow throw their paper route, so they wouldn’t get in trouble, you know? I wanted to help, you know? Then there were about a hundred cop cars in the parking lot,” she said.

  “It’s okay,” Cecil said. He was again tempted to offer some consolation—You helped him, I know you did—but he curtailed the impulse. Behind them, an apartment door opened and a woman in a terry-cloth robe stepped outside. She lit a cigarette, exhaled smoke. She walked in a small circle, watching her feet.

  “Not my mother,” the girl said. “That’s Ruby. She’s a substitute teacher and amateur alcoholic. Her son and Justin used to pass the football. I could watch them for hours.”

  Ruby drew on her cigarette and swatted away the smoke. Cecil said, “I appreciate you making time to talk.”

  “Tell him I said hey.”

  “Beg pardon?” Cecil said.

  “Just do it, okay?” she said. “Tell him Marcy says hey and she, you know, misses him. Tell him I still have the conch and the game is still saved.”

  “Honey,” he said, feeling a spasm of alarm. He didn’t know how she’d picked up on his relationship with Justin, but he was suddenly certain that coming to the Bluff was a mistake. His heart was kicking in his chest. Sweat was running down his back. “Honey, I’m just here to take in the sights.”

  “Just do it,” she said. “Please just do this one thing. Please.”

  15

  SHE’D BEEN THINKING ABOUT THE MERIDIAN AGAIN, THE BEFORE and after of her life. For years, she would have sworn she hadn’t imagined past the moment when Justin would be back in her arms. Had anyone accused her otherwise, she would have balked. Allowing herself to dream up how it would be to have him back home, how it would be to watch him grow and love and marry and prosper, or even to watch him rinse out a cereal bowl, would have been too risky, decadent in its presumption. If anything, she had bargained the other way. She had conceived of scenarios where he was located but remained largely disconnected from his family. In one, he talked with her on the phone, assured her that he was safe and happy, but for some reason would always live apart from them. In another, he met her in a secluded place—a park shaded by weeping willows and live oak, an isolated stretch of beach where the heavy slosh of the tide washed out their voices—and he told her that he was setting out on his own, but he would write letters. She had even pictured a situation similar to one she’d read on a missing-children website: A mother’s daughter had been kidnapped by the father, and when the police tracked the two of them down in another state, the mother flew out and sat in an unmarked van across the street, watching her daughter play in the yard through blacked-out windows. She watched her like that for almost a month while the case was being built. Moments had come when Laura believed that was all she needed. Show me he’s okay, she’d think, and I’ll live.

  But now she realized that she had granted herself more substantive fantasies. The realization was dousing to her spirits, for by denying herself such indulgence, by forcing herself to keep her expectations painfully low, she’d believed she was doing something right. She’d believed such restraint, such demeaning sacrifice, would pay off. A feeling of penance. Of fasting in her heart. But, no. She’d always envisioned Justin’s homecoming in such easy terms that they were almost vulgar in their simplicity. Her notions of his rejoining the family were hardly more nuanced than all of them bounding over a fence, hurdling from despair on one side to salvation on the other. It was ridiculous.

  And it was unfair to everyone, especially Justin. This hit her one evening while Justin and Eric were practicing parallel parking and Griff w
as at the Teepee. Whether talking with Letty Villarreal had brought it on, or seeing Eric turn the corner from awkward reticence to sure-footed confidence around Justin, or whether Laura had been heading toward such a realization all along, she didn’t know. Nor did she care. She only knew she felt reanimated and clean, as if some sludge, some corrosive grime, had been inside her veins and now it had been purged. She vowed to think differently. She would see him as an animal in the ocean, a porpoise or whale or some sweet manatee, long submerged and scared, cautiously making his way to the surface. She would swim beside him, at his pace, rising as he did. The imagery had come from her time at Marine Lab, of course, the hours of watching Alice disappear and then come up for air, but Laura wondered if the image wasn’t also rooted in something else she hadn’t dared to think about for years: Justin’s first word. Not Mama or Mommy. Not Daddy. No, Justin had been strapped into his high chair, pushing Cheerios around his tray, when she and Eric heard him clearly and emphatically say “Fish.”